1849 ELLWOOD FISHER. Lecture on the South's Superiority to the North and Boon of Slavery & Plantations.

A widely distributed Lecture, first printed in Cincinnati, but quickly followed by Charlestown, South Carolina, Richmond, Virginia, and other pro-slavery Southern cities. When first delivered, the address itself caused quite a hullabaloo and led to severe criticisms in response to this, the Cincinnati imprint.

Fisher, in a stunning instance of inability to "read the room," rebuts the conventional wisdom, especially in the North, that the South was falling behind by nearly every measure, i.e. population, manufacturing, the arts, and trade. It is said, he reports, that ". . . the harbors of Norfolk, of Richmond, of Charleston, and Savannah, have been deserted for those of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston; and New Orleans is the only Southern city that pretends to rival its Northern competitors. The grass is growing in the streets of those cities of the South, which originally monopolized  colonial commerce, and maintained their ascendancy in the earlier years of the Union. Manufactures and the arts have also gone to take up their abode in the North. Cities have been expanded and multiplied in the same favored region." However, Fisher argues, ". . . in the production of food, housing, and other indicia of wealth, despite southerners' oft-expressed fears of their decline, the South is prospering. Slavery and an agricultural way of life have enhanced the South's prospects. By contrast, the proliferation of cities in the north brings inequality of condition, great depravity of morals, great increase of want and [a great increase] of crime . . ."

Fisher, Ellwood. Lecture on the North and the South, Delivered before the Young Men's Mercantile Library Association, of Cincinnati, Ohio, January 16, 1849. Cincinnati. The Daily Chronicle. 46pp.

A good + copy, bound in wraps, disbound, with light foxing.